Apple's first generation Apple TVs have lost their ability to connect to iTunes and appears to be affecting users worldwide.

A lengthy Apple Discussions page shows that the problem started on the 17th of April and has persisted for 1st generation Apple TV users. Forum poster georgevargas describes the issue:

Quote:

As of last night I had full access to the iTunes Store. Since this morning I was getting an Itunes Store Not Available message, and after unplugging the AppleTv the iTunes Store access completly disappeared except for movie trailers.

Users have gone through the usual diagnostics, including rebooting and restoring, but have found that nothing has restored connectivity. MacRumors has confirmed the issue on our own 1st generation Apple TV.

The initial timing of the outage corresponds to the FaceTime not working for iOS 6 users, suggesting some internal changes by Apple has affected both services. Some users are speculating that internal communication upgrades related to the Heartbleed security issue could be related. Apple denied that Heartbleed affected any of its "key services" but did not elaborate on what those might be.

Apple has not provided any statement on if and when 1st generation Apple TV functionality will be restored or not. The first generation Apple TV was released in January, 2007 and was sold until September, 2010.

Update 4/22 12:00 PM PT: Apple appears to have resolved the issue preventing first-generation Apple TVs from connecting to iTunes. Many users are reporting that their Apple TVs are once again functional.

Seems as though Apple was quietly doing some core service updates for whatever reason, be it security or laying the groundwork or foundations for new functionality with the next version of iOS, something they probably do every year (so everything "just works" right out of the box) but this time they appear to have inadvertently broken older versions of the software in the process.

Was iOS 5.x.x affected as well as iOS 6 for the FaceTime issue?

Slightly related note, but it is hard to believe that the Apple TV is over 7 years old now! Was the latest updated version of software it received an iOS 6 based variant? Might explain a couple of things it was.

Does anyone at Apple observe EASTER? If it was Earth Day, I could understand the company holiday. LOL

Whether they do or don't is personal and private. It's a Sunday. Typically Corporate, especially the engineers etc are working Monday to Friday so they wouldn't be at the office on a Sunday anyway. And it's highly unlikely that Apple is going to call a Code Red and demand everyone come on a Sunday, that also happens to be a holiday, for an issue with a product that is legally obsolete etc. Particularly when the cut of owners is likely very by small at this point. It will wait until tomorrow.

Oh here comes the posts of "Apple purposely did this to make people upgrade to the newest Apple TV".

Mysteriously followed by the "Too old anyway, you guys should upgrade." brigade

It's really not that Farfetch'd to say Apple might cause some hiccups to get people to buy newer products. Frankly it seems like a good, albeit completely unethical, way to get customers to stop messing around with their several year old products without completely screwing them over.